Merle Hansen - Farmers Union

Farmers Union

In the late 1940s, Hansen also worked as a field organizer for the South Dakota Farmers Union, and later for the Iowa Farmers Union, where he worked under IFU President Fred Stover, the former liaison between the USDA and the Roosevelt White House. Stover was a close ally of former Vice President Henry C. Wallace and one of the policy authors of the New Deal's innovative but controversial agricultural reforms. Stover would become Hansen's mentor, teaching him many of the Byzantine intricacies of federal farm policy and remaining a close ally and partner of Hansen's from the 1950s to the 1980s.

During his time in Iowa with Farmers Union, Hansen became a close friend and supporter of the prominent African-American activist Edna Griffin, the organizer of one of the nation's first desegregation campaigns. While working with Griffin in her efforts to integrate Katz Drug Store in Des Moines, Hansen developed a friendship with the Griffin family and became an early and enthusiastic supporter of the civil rights movement. Griffin's husband, an African-American doctor, was the attending physician at the birth of two of Hansen's children.

At the outbreak of the Korean War, a conflict erupted between Stover and the National Farmers Union, with Stover opposing American intervention and NFU President James Patton supporting President Truman, with whom he had a close working relationship. This conflict caused the Iowa Farmers Union to splinter into bitterly opposed factions and eventually would cause Stover's removal as state president. In the midst of the controversy, Hansen returned to his family's farm in Madison County, Nebraska. Throughout the 1950s, he continued his involvement in farm politics, serving as a vice president of Fred Stover's newly-formed US Farmers Association and working with the local chapter of the burgeoning National Farmers Organization.

In the 1970s, Hansen served as the president of Nebraskans for Peace, an anti-war and social justice organization. He also served as a state officer in the American Agriculture Movement, the militant farm organization responsible for orchestrating the "tractorcades," a public relations spectacle in which hundreds of farmers drove their tractors through the city streets of Washington DC.